


Open House

by inkvoices



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Be_compromised Promptathon, Clint Barton Collector of Strays, Clint Barton Data Analyst, Clint Barton Single Dad, Community: be_compromised, First Meetings, Gen, Single Parents, competent clint barton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26621671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/pseuds/inkvoices
Summary: When Natasha lands the jet in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, she seriously considers the possibility that her first solo assignment for SHIELD is a joke, because surely this isn't where the Director of SHIELD really expects her to meet the best data analyst in the business to give him the Red Room file.It's afarmhousewith an actual porch swing, like something out of a movie. And it's full ofkids.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 18
Kudos: 65
Collections: Be Compromised Promptathon





	Open House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlphaFlyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlphaFlyer/gifts).



> Written for Alphaflyer in the [be_compromised Epic Summer Promptathon 2020](https://be-compromised.dreamwidth.org/583594.html) for the prompt of single dad Clint Barton. Thank you to CloudAtlas for beta reading!

When Natasha lands the jet in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, she seriously considers the possibility that this assignment is a joke. She double checks the GPS coordinates, but they match the ones she was given exactly. She hadn't thought that Nicholas Fury was the type, but she's heard of American hazing rituals and it’s the best explanation she can think of, because surely _this_ isn't where the Director of SHIELD _really_ expects her to meet the best data analyst in the business.

It's a _farmhouse_ with an actual porch swing, like something out of a movie. There's an old car and a minivan parked by a barn. Random items litter the grass and the porch; a ball, a pair of child's shoes, a tricycle lying on its side. The front door is open and the noise escaping from inside sounds mostly like _children_. 

"Have you seen my backpack?" someone shouts from upstairs - a young voice, male, just starting to break.

"Kitchen," a girl shouts back, overlapping with a man asking, "Do you have that form I had to sign?" and the wail of an annoyed small child. A dog barks. There’s a blast of music in a different part of the house followed by two other young people laughing, male and female. “ _Quentin!_ ”someone complains.

Natasha considers walking away, but she's met contacts in stranger places. It's just they were exactly that: strange places. Not this… advertisement for the American family homestead.

She steps through the door and follows the sound of the man's voice, as he’s the occupant most likely to be her contact and most likely to pose the biggest threat, ending up in the doorway to the kitchen.

The man notices her immediately.

"Guest!" he calls out, continuing to spoon-feed a toddler sat in a highchair even as he alerts the rest of the house to her presence.

He looks to be in his late thirties or early forties, lines creasing the corners of his eyes and bracketing his mouth, wearing jeans and a purple t-shirt. He’s attractive for an older man, enough that if he were a mark she wouldn’t mind fucking him even though she’s been informed that’s ‘not a requirement’ in SHIELD, which she’s aware doesn’t mean that they won’t ask or expect it. He's unarmed, but his build and biceps, along with the awareness of his surroundings, are suspiciously better than average. That, along with the fact he doesn't seem at all surprised to see a stranger in a field suit with a gun holstered on each thigh appear in his house, makes her think that he might be her contact after all.

But then there are all the _kids_.

Natasha opens her mouth to ask the man's name, to use the code phrase Fury gave her, to say _something_ , but she can't find her moment. Everyone is loud and constantly moving, like a field team gearing up for a mission, and she’s the outsider who doesn’t fit.

"Form," a girl says, handing the man said paper form and pen. She’s somewhere around nine to eleven years old, which Natasha thinks Americans call a ‘tween’; a cute word for something they don’t consider a threat, but in the Red Room girls made their first kill by that age or were killed for failing.

There's a smooth exchange of paper for the spoon and child's bowl of mush and the girl finishes feeding time while the man clears enough space on the huge, wooden kitchen table to sign her form, pushing aside the remnants of a large breakfast. Immediately after he bends down to grab the strap of a backpack from under the table, tossing it to a boy - about a foot taller than the girl and just old enough to be called a teenager - as he slides past Natasha into the kitchen. 

"Thanks, dad." 

The boy takes the last piece of toast from a plate in the middle of the table, stuffing the whole thing into his mouth as he slings the backpack over his shoulder so he has both hands and arms free to scoop up a pile of paper bags lined up on one of the counters. The girl takes back her form and steals one of the bags from - her brother? The man wipes down the child in the highchair, dropping its dirty bib on the table and swapping its food-splattered top for a clean one, before lifting it up and propping it on his hip. 

Loud music is playing somewhere else in the house, there’s occasional barking from above their heads, and while all of this is happening there’s an older, black teen – or maybe man is better description as he looks only a few years younger than Natasha, except too innocent and weak – sitting at the kitchen table somehow ignoring it all, intently focussed on whatever he’s typing on a well-used laptop.

Natasha moves out of the way for the boy with the bags and his sister, just in time to also avoid _four more_ teenagers - two girls who look Asian-American, a Hispanic girl with stars tattooed on her wrists, and a skinny boy with bright pink hair - who congregate in the hall behind her. One of the girls has a quiver full of arrows and a case, presumably for a bow. It's almost a relief that someone in this house is armed, except she just screws up her nose at Natasha before the Hispanic girl elbows her and she turns away, tossing her hair. Each of the teens collects a paper bag from the boy as they make their way out of the house. A moment later a woman close to Natasha’s age, wearing dark clothes, dark make-up, and a dark frown, comes down the stairs and follows them out, trailed by a dog.

"Time," the man says, which seems to be a signal for the last remaining kid to close his laptop with a sigh and go after the others. He at least raises an eyebrow at Natasha as he passes by, but she gets the feeling it's because he's only just realised that she's here rather than something approaching a sane, civilian reaction to a random, openly armed stranger showing up for breakfast.

"Can I offer you anything?" The man jiggles the smallest kid on his hip and it gives a happy gurgle. "Coffee, iced tea, water?"

Natasha shakes her head, serene on the outside but internally struggling with… this domesticity that’s utterly outside her comfort zone; the organised chaos and the competence of the one adult in the middle of it all. It's not the kind of competent that she's used to, but somehow that just makes it all the more impressive. Even if he does have holes in his jeans.

He snatches a set of keys off a peg, ushers her down the corridor ahead of him and out of the house, and locks the front door behind him. And Natasha just… lets it all happen. She watches him load the smallest child into a car seat in the minivan, already packed with the younger kids, and wave off the older teens who leave in the car. Then he gets into the driver's seat of the minivan and drives off, leaving Natasha standing on the porch.

The dog ambles over to stand next to her for a moment, wagging its tail. It looks at her with its one good eye, then goes to lie down under the porch swing for a nap. 

Natasha thinks about going back to the jet and abandoning her first solo SHIELD assignment, or contacting Fury to ask what the hell he means by sending her here, or breaking into the farmhouse to search for evidence of… whatever there is to find. In the end, she settles onto the swing to wait. If there is something happening here, some test, then she will not fail it.

The man returns almost an hour later, alone. 

He switches off the minivan’s engine, gets out, and walks up to her slowly, standing on the grass with a healthy distance still between them.

"Does the school run usually take that long," Natasha asks, speaking first in an attempt to control their interaction this time, "or were you looking me up?"

She’s lounging on the porch swing like she belongs here, like this isn’t the first time that she’s sat on one and didn't spend ten minutes earlier rocking back and forth just for the hell of it.

"Oh, I know who you are." He looks up at her, giving her a small smile when he meets her eyes. "You have something for me?"

Natasha stares at him, trying to make this man in front of her fit with everything she's heard about 'Hawkeye'. The so-called best data analyst in the business, who can apparently take one look at a billion tiny pieces of information and see the big picture, what fits together and how. Who can see which threads to tug on to set future events in motion or to unravel them completely. 

"Maybe," she says and he laughs. It's irritating, but she won't let it show. "I'm looking for Clint Barton."

"Yeah, that's me. And you're the Black Widow, currently going by Natasha Romanoff." He grins and folds his arms, which, unintentionally or not, shows off his biceps. "And now that we're all introduced, what've you got for me?"

She raises her eyebrows and goes on the offensive, refusing to cede conversational control to a man who lives on a _farm_.

"You let the Black Widow walk into your home, among your children?" 

"Well," Clint says casually, "only three of them are actually mine. Four if you count the one I adopted." Under the porch swing the dog snorts in its sleep. "Oh,” he adds, “and Lucky's mine."

"Your wife doesn't mind?" Natasha says, smiling sweetly.

"She divorced me and ran off with the family tax accountant, so she's not really in a place to judge."

He says it in the same light tone, but Natasha's not sure that she believes him.

"It’s the Red Room file, right?" he says, taking a step closer and letting his arms fall to his sides, loose and relaxed.

She assumes Fury called ahead and Clint was only expecting one field operative for breakfast this morning, but he’s still stupid for showing his hand. She rolls her eyes.

"Look, I know who you are." He keeps slowly moving closer as he speaks. "I know you were taken by the Red Room as a kid. I know what they made you do. I know when you escaped and went solo. I know where SHIELD found you. I know because I found you for them. I know you," he says, not unkindly, and, despite all of her training, Natasha freezes.

She'd had to leave everything behind when she ran away from the Red Room. She hadn't been strong enough to bury it, to raze it to the ground, only to get herself out. One person against the entire Red Room isn't enough to bring it down, however much she'd like it to be.

The knowledge that Red Room files exist on her somewhere and that there are people still alive who know too much, who shaped her and made her and know her inside out, fuels her nightmares. Bad enough what she’s done in their name. Bad enough what she’s done for others and in her own name since. She has seen those that the Red Room has made into their puppets, ready to comply, and she’s terrified of ever becoming that. She’s willingly pooled her knowledge with SHIELD in the hope of taking the Red Room down, for her own peace of mind as much as anything else. 

Of course SHIELD has its own file on her. Of course. She never expected otherwise. But for this man to outright tell her that he compiled it, analysed her, _used_ … 

Natasha has to force herself to keep breathing. 

"I know you want to go after the Red Room," Clint continues, almost at the bottom of the porch steps now. "I can help you end those sick bastards. So how about you show me the file that you and SHIELD have pulled together, and stick around here for a bit while we figure it out. I can ask two of the girls to share and you can have a room to yourself – ”

"I'm not some stray kid that needs taking in," Natasha snaps, standing up. The porch swing rocks back and forward with her violent departure, forcing her to move out of its way. It also wakes up the dog, who skitters backwards with a whine. 

She's suddenly drawing conclusions from Fury suggesting this trip might take some time, and to pack accordingly, and not appreciating the implications.

"One for your collection," she says flatly, giving up the code phrase. _One for your collection_ , because Nicholas Fury is a -

"Okay," Clint says, standing still at the bottom of the steps and holding his hands out in a placating gesture. "Okay, let's remember that three of those kids are mine when you say 'strays', yeah? And Daisy was my god-daughter before her mom passed and I adopted her."

"And the rest?" Like it matters.

"Aren't school age." Clint runs a hand through his hair and sighs. "It’s not really my place to say, y'know? I guess… Kate pretty much adopted _me_. Her girlfriend came as a package deal, but America's the only other person here who can drive, so. David's finishing a SHIELD funded doctorate, so that's kind of a work placement internship type thing? Wanda just needs a place to stay for a while. And Quentin… is Quentin. I mean, he might destroy the world or he might end climate change, or he might end climate change by destroying the world. Who knows?"

Natasha stalks across the porch and down the steps until she’s at eye level with him - which means she still stops a few steps up from the ground because he's annoyingly tall. 

"What is this?" she demands. "A recovery programme? Come live with other disturbed youths and learn how to be _normal_?"

The dog whines again at her raised voice, but stays on the porch.

"I'm a data analyst," Clint says, meeting her eyes. "I analysed and I made a choice. SHIELD wanted you terminated. The deal was: I help them find you, they send you here."

She doesn't want it to make sense, but it does. Why wouldn't SHIELD get rid of a player capable of escaping and evading the Red Room, one even the Red Room couldn't control?

One of her hands drifts down to grip the gun strapped to her left thigh, although she leaves it holstered. For now.

Clint Barton doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t so much as blink, and she wonders who this man is that he isn’t afraid of the Black Widow and invites her into his home. Where he and his children sleep at night. Defenceless. 

" _You're_ SHIELD," Natasha protests, heart pounding.

She'd thought that she'd chosen SHIELD, when they’d offered. But is that true, when Clint Barton chose for her first? Would they have let her walk away? Would he?

Clint shrugs. "Technically I'm retired."

"If you're so keen on having me here," Natasha says, “why drive off?" 

She folds her arms, moving her hands a little further away from the temptation of her guns. She doesn’t really want to shoot a father of four who hasn’t done anything to deserve it, or at least hasn’t yet. She’s _not_ a child and she _won’t_ be ruled by her emotions, by fear or anger. That at least is a choice that she _can_ make.

"If you don't want to be here," Clint replies quietly, "why'd you stay and wait?"

She stares at him, feeling young and small and hating it. 

"It was a test. I knew it was a test - "

Clint reaches out, as if he’s going to touch her, but she flinches back automatically before he can complete the action and he pauses, tucking his hands into his pockets instead. She hasn’t flinched since she was seven years old. She can feel herself unravelling, the world shifting beneath her feet. 

"It wasn't a test, Natasha. It was a choice." 

She swallows down the acid that rises in the back of her throat, because that's what she's been trying to do, to choose for herself, but every time she's tried to make a choice it seems like she's had no choice at all.

She hears the click of claws on the wooden porch behind her as the dog – Lucky – comes down the steps and she tenses as it stops next to her, but all it does is gently lean its weight against her leg and rub its head against her thigh, just below her holster, with a soft whine. Lucky is warm, even through her field uniform. Real. Just a dumb dog, as stupid as its master.

“He likes head scritches,” Clint tells her, as if she should care. As if she knows what that means.

“What do you _want_?”

“Not my choice,” Clint says with a small smile, as if it's that easy. “You can go back to SHIELD if you want. The assignment was to bring me the file; you leave it with me and you haven't failed. My deal with them was that they'd send you here and they have; there wasn't a length of stay requirement.” He shrugs. “They won't terminate you, now that they have you. They just didn't know having you was an option.”

That makes sense. It aligns with the investment SHIELD has made in her so far – debriefing and assessments and ‘getting her head straight’. That SHIELD probably aren’t going to try to kill her, at least not anytime soon, is more of a relief than she’d expected and grants her a measure of firm ground once more. She’ll trust, but verify.

Natasha glares at him for the idea that SHIELD ‘has’ her though, like she’s some kind of prize, and he grins.

“SHIELD do good work,” Clint continues, “and you're a good fit for them - you’ll be amazing, probably reach Specialist in no time - but if you go back now will you have a life outside of the job? They’ll help you, to deal with your past as much as possible, but there’ll be some things that they just won’t see as a problem. They’re your employer; they’ve got a code of ethics and everything, but the agency’s interests take priority over yours. Like when they’ve only got so much time to teach you, they might let you take your pick of work related interests but are they going to encourage you explore things outside of that?” 

He pauses, giving her space to think about what he’s saying and checking her reaction, but Natasha isn’t really interested in whatever education he thinks she might miss out on by returning to SHIELD. She wants their help taking down the Red Room and, beyond that, if working for them means less red in her ledger then she’ll take it.

“Alright,” Clint tries, “how about like I'll look at the Red Room file, and maybe you'll be included in the missions to take them out and maybe you won't. You’ll be a cog in the machine and they’ll decide how you turn.”

Natasha frowns. She doesn’t think SHIELD would cut her out of any Red Room related activity entirely, not when she’s been a key intelligence source, but he’s right that she’s handed control to SHIELD and that rankles.

“Or,” he says, dragging the word out, “you could stay here for a while. Help me add up everything we know about the Red Room. Maybe find out something more, see the bigger picture. Take the lead on this. And maybe find out something more about yourself.”

“From the Buddha of broken people,” she says dryly. 

Clint is the one to flinch then; it’s almost imperceptible but he does it. 

Lucky abandons Natasha to butt his head against Clint’s leg instead, barking happily when Clint crouches down to scratch him between the ears with one hand and pet his back with the other. 

Natasha unfolds her arms as she studies Clint properly, opening up her body language while keeping her hands away from her glocks. Close up he looks younger, closer to mid-thirties, just weathered with old scars on his arms and one side of his neck. There are defined abs underneath that tight t-shirt and biceps like those take effort; she doesn’t believe all he’s ever done for SHIELD is analyse data. 

He left his door open for her to walk into his home, he takes chaos in his stride, and he smiles with his eyes.

“Take some time to think about it - ” he starts as he stands back up.

Natasha interrupts him, arching one eyebrow as she says, “You already left me here for an hour.”

“So I did,” Clint says. 

The thing is, when SHIELD offered Natasha a place in their organisation she’d accepted it. She’d seen in them an opportunity to take down the Red Room, but Clint Barton is apparently SHIELD’s tool of choice to do that and Clint Barton is the reason SHIELD made her that offer in the first place, so. 

And if she’s honest with herself, really honest, there’s a part of her that wants a taste of what he’s offering. She can’t remember her life before the Red Room, although she imagines that she had a family. She’s only ever known the Red Room and then a life on the run, sleeping with one eye open, and SHIELD is different but in many ways more of the same. She wonders what a large family breakfast might be like, or living with kids who aren’t actively fighting to kill each other under orders, or how she might be introduced when Clint lists his collection of strays. 

Fury expected this assignment to take some time, practically pushed her into Clint’s open arms, so why not stay here for a while and indulge her curiosity? 

“I could stay a little longer,” Natasha says.

A smile blooms on Clint’s face and he winks before skirting around her to jog up the porch steps and unlock the front door. Lucky follows at his heels, wandering inside as soon he pushes the door open. 

He looks back over his shoulder at her and says, “Want to bring that file in with you? And your stuff - if you brought any?”

“On the jet,” she tells him. It’s a physical file, safer than digital as long as no one else gets their hands on it and easier to destroy if they do. She also has a bag, although she packed for ‘assignment of unknown length’ and not ‘holiday at a farmhouse’.

“Okay,” Clint says easily. “That’ll give me time to do the dishes and get a coffee. Want me to make you one?”

Natasha thinks back to his earlier offer of a drink and wants to ask for something else, for iced tea or water or another thing he might have, just to make a different choice, but actually coffee sounds good so she nods. Then adds, “With two sugars.” Just because she can.


End file.
